22 January 2017 1:40 AM

Did those who praised Chairman May’s speech on the EU actually read it? It was not as tough as it was made to look. In fact I don’t think it was tough at all.

In general, Chairman May strikes me as one of the most nervous Prime Ministers I’ve ever seen, constantly worried that someone will poke his head around the door and tell her it’s all been a mistake and she must go back to being head of the drains committee on some borough council.

She’s there because better qualified people are waiting for her to fail.

Any Labour leader but Jeremy Corbyn (who is even more insecure) would laugh off her rehearsed, scripted and unsuccessful attempts to be witty at his expense.

And the speech was like one of those garishly packaged boxes of fireworks I recall from the 1950s, promising brilliance and thunder, but delivering fizzles and pops.

The most vital bit was her pledge to put any deal to both Houses of Parliament.

Why, in that case, fight a case in the Supreme Court to keep Parliament out of the process?

It was when she said this that the pound steadied, because the Europhiles in the City knew what she meant. What a weapon this places in the hands of the EU.

For decades, British Ministers in Brussels talks have been puzzled by the way in which their secret final negotiating positions appear to be known to the Superstate’s officials. Who can guess why that is?

Now the EU’s functionaries will also know that their allies in the Lords and Commons can undermine the British team at any time.

The mere knowledge that the deal will have to get past both Houses (where the majority of Lords and Commons wish we had voted to stay in) will mean constant pressure to give way. The EU’s salami-slicing machine will be whizzing, night and day.

There’s plenty of room for such compromise in Chairman May’s speech.

She says she doesn’t want ‘membership’ of the single market. But that leaves room for keeping many, if not most, of its provisions.

As for her plan to leave the Customs Union without giving up its benefits, experts tell me this is simply impossible. One or the other, not both.

There was also a miserable section which suggested to me that she wants to keep the ghastly European Arrest Warrant. This is one of the very worst aspects of our EU membership.

It gives the courts of various squalid, half-free EU members the power to seize British subjects and carry them off.

Chairman May was very keen on this measure when she was at the Home Office, keeping us in it when she was free to leave it.

My judgment on this process is that it has only just begun. Confident speeches before battle are all very well. But resolve is not tested until the first blows are struck.

04 September 2016 1:34 AM

What are the real thoughts of Chairman May as she sits amid a Cabinet made up mostly of nonentities nobody would recognise in the street?

There this feeble Politburo hunches, squeaking amid the Elizabethan grandeur of Chequers, a government committed to a task most of them hate. Even Boris Johnson doesn’t really want to leave the EU.

‘Brexit means Brexit,’ intones the Prime Minister. But this slogan seems to have escaped from Lewis Carroll’s Alice books, where Humpty Dumpty proclaims that words mean what he says they mean.

If I were her, I’d be scared of the months to come. France, our ancient rival, has spotted that nobody in London has decided what we really want.

As we dither, they will undermine us. Before long it will be clear that either we exit the EU single market and take our chances, or do a deal under which we stay, more or less, under Brussels rule.

France wouldn’t be able to bully a government committed to departure, backed by a parliamentary majority.

Such a government could be genuinely tough in talks, because it had a real, much desired aim.

But this lot? As Winston Churchill said of a similarly soggy Cabinet in 1936, they are ‘decided only to be undecided, resolved to be irresolute, adamant for drift, solid for fluidity’.

From behind them come the endless whispers, especially from the USA, which drove us into the EU in the first place, that we might ‘walk back’ the decision.

Plus there are the mutterings of the Civil Service, the diplomats, and the BBC.

These are tricky times. Chairman May, who claims to admire the first Queen Elizabeth, may find that she faces nearly as many foes as that cunning monarch did, at home and abroad.

But the most dangerous ones will be among the smiling faces round the Chequers table.

She is not there because she is strong but because – for the moment – nobody else is stronger.

Cowardly truth about Oxford's state school 'success'

Oxford University boasts of increasing its state school intake to 59.2 per cent. How cowardly of it. On the same day we learned that most boys (50.46 per cent) leave state primary school without reaching the Government’s pretty basic standards in reading, writing or maths. Many will never catch up.

If state school children are getting into Oxford, it’s either because they go to super-exclusive fake comprehensives, surrounded by expensive houses or open only to churchgoers; or they go to besieged and rare grammar schools; or they have private tutors; or they have been given special treatment and are not really up to Oxford’s standards.

In the days before ‘comprehensive’ schools, Oxford’s non-public school intake was rising fast without any of these tricks or reduced standards – from 38 per cent in 1939 to 51 per cent by 1965.

If grammar schools had survived, many reckon it would soon have reached 70 per cent, and maybe higher. Oxford should campaign to bring back selective state schools, not cringe before the equality commissars.

But we are at the mercy of crude egalitarians. The supposedly Tory Government continues to employ Alan Milburn, the Blairite former Cabinet Minister and (so far as I know) unrepentant student Marxist.

Mr Milburn, who refuses to tell me where his own children went to school, regularly attacks the privilege of private education, though never that of the socially exclusive pseudo-comprehensive state schools favoured by well-off Leftists.

As head of the creepy quango the Social Mobility Commission, he cranks out regular reports claiming that public school toffs rule the world. He’s just got lots of headlines by claiming that City bankers still discriminate against applicants who wear brown shoes.

His evidence for this? A 15-year-old book about the death of the traditional banking industry, by a man whose name his report misspells, and another book on the City by a Dutch expert on the Middle East.

People do believe what they want to believe, I find.

It's official: The British bobby IS dead

My ‘I told you so’ department is now back from a much-needed holiday, after a long summer of full-power gloating and smirking. Immediately it has new work to do. Her Majesty’s Chief Inspector of Constabulary has (after 50 years) finally grasped that police foot patrols have been abolished.

Congratulations, HM Inspector! Well spotted! Even so, he buried it in his complacent survey report, where among all the politically correct stuff, it reveals on page 38 that one third of us have not seen a uniformed police officer on foot in their area in the past year – in the past two decades, in my case.

Even this fact is turned into a PC lecture about ‘more deprived areas’. One in four say they see one once a month. If so, he was probably nipping into Costa Coffee for a flat white.

So what are they doing instead? As we learned again last week, car pursuits seem to appeal far more than plodding the pavement deterring crime and disorder. Are these pursuits – which in some years have led to as many as 20 innocent deaths – even remotely worth the risk?

But while resources are available for such chases, what of shopping centres such as The Stow in Harlow, where a Polish man, Arkadiusz Jozwik, was violently (and fatally) attacked? Gangs of menacing youths smoking cannabis, that peaceful drug Sir Richard Branson wants to legalise, have been patrolling The Stow for months, promoting fear and disorder.

But police – as everywhere – seem to have paid little attention to either the menace or the illegal drug abuse. Now, too late, they are present – for a while. And there is a lot of grandiose stuff about a ‘hate crime’.

Maybe, maybe not, but it might also be ‘Dope Crime’, that growing category, and also a ‘Neglect Crime’, the sort of thing that happens on streets which the police have quietly ceded to the violent and lawless.

Can there be any simpler way of putting this? Doctors should never go on strike. Mercy is not a commodity that can just be withdrawn.

People living with pain and fear cannot be deliberately ignored by those trained and paid to help them.

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24 August 2014 12:01 AM

Silently, and without noticing, we have become used to levels of crime and disorder which would have shocked and angered our forebears.

Well, they still shock me. You can often find it in the way we talk of a ‘burglary that went wrong’, as if there was one that could ever go right.

Or when (this is an epidemic now) the media describe some revolting, lawless murder as an ‘execution’, which is exactly the opposite of what it is.

A real, lawful execution of the criminal culprit would be the best way of preventing such horrors.

I was furious last week to read reports of the machine gun murder of 24-year-old mother Sabrina Moss.

What enraged me most was that the account said she had been ‘in the wrong place at the wrong time’.

Well, Sabrina was in Kilburn High Road, a normal London main street, near which I once lived, sheltering from the rain outside a fast food joint.

It was pretty early in the morning, but so what?

If it is now reasonable to expect that you will be machine-gunned by members of a drug gang because you are sheltering from the rain in the small hours in Kilburn High Road, then you are in the wrong country.

To me, this was more distressing by far than the murder of the brave American journalist James Foley, somewhere in Syria. I will discuss that outrage elsewhere.

It is quite right to be disgusted by cruel and violent death wherever it happens, but surely our first concerns lie closer to home, not least because, if we wished, we could do something about it.

All the solutions to this sort of thing are quite simple, as I found out some years ago when I researched and wrote a book about what happened in the Sixties and afterwards to our police, courts and prisons.

Since then, I have been unable to take the statements of most politicians on the subject seriously. They plainly have no idea what is going on at all.

We made a series of simple, reversible errors, mainly to suit the political and moral fashions of the time.

The book was, of course, abused where it was not ignored, as all reasonable Conservative positions are these days.

A few years ago I gave a copy to the current Home Secretary, Mrs May, but I have yet to see any sign that she has read it, let alone that she agrees with it.

A British Government could, if it wished, deal with these mistakes in a few compact Acts of Parliament.

And it could then set out on the longer task of rebuilding the married family on which our prosperity, safety, civility and future chiefly depend.

But none of them will. So we are all condemned to be ‘in the wrong place at the wrong time’.

Bloody lessons we didn’t need to learn

For all the good he did by coming back from Cornwall last week, the Prime Minister might just as well have stayed on holiday, perhaps studying some more fishmongers’ slabs.

There he might find a flounder, the creature he currently most resembles – flat and still for most of the time, flailing wildly about when agitated.

The public murder of journalist James Foley has stirred a great deal of powerless frenzy. As you listen to our leaders and their media friends raging and threatening vague things, I urge you to remember the following: They used to say exactly the same about the Provisional IRA, whose apologists are now welcome to sup with Her Majesty at Windsor Castle. If people such as me criticise them, they grow pious and call themselves ‘peacemakers’.

Poor Mr Foley (may God rest his soul) was captured in November 2012 by the Syrian rebels our Government (and those of the USA and France) were already encouraging against President Assad.

On August 11, 2012, the former Foreign Secretary Malcolm Rifkind said sides had already been picked. He said we should be ‘giving them [rebels against Assad] equipment to bring the conflict to an end much sooner’.

Now this genius, a man who has had great power in the State, is saying we should work with President Assad against the Islamist fanatics.

He might claim he had learned from his mistakes. But he had no need to. This outcome was obvious at the time. In June 2012, I wrote ‘Why do William Hague and the BBC want to help Saudi Arabia set up a fanatical Islamist state in Syria?

‘Don’t we realise that the “activists” we support are just as capable of conducting massacres as the pro-Assad militias?’ I also passed on reports from informants in Syria who told of ‘Salafis, ultra-puritan Muslims influenced by Saudi teachings, who loathe and threaten Syria’s minorities of Alawites and Christians.’

In February that year, I had written: ‘I tremble for the fate of Syria’s Christians if the Assad regime falls.’

The weathercock politicians who now claim to be shocked by the deeds of IS should be ceaselessly reminded that they helped to create it, when they could have known better.

And, like those who supported the Blair War in Iraq, their every public statement should be accompanied by a large warning, saying: ‘Wrong then – why should I be right now?’

Meanwhile, the Chilcot Report on the Iraq War remains unpublished, a scandal greater than any in modern times.

The sight of men swathed in safety gear on the face of Big Ben – in living memory of the days when the same job was done with a few ropes and planks – reminds us once again of one of the greatest national mistakes we ever made.

In this country, we are no more afraid of heights or of danger than we ever were. But we are terrified of lawyers. The trouble is, hardly anyone realises to this day that this tyranny of the ambulance-chasers was caused quite deliberately by the supposedly conservative Thatcher and Major Governments, in Section 58 of the Courts and Legal Services Act 1990 and the Conditional Fee Agreements Regulations, passed as a Statutory Instrument in 1995.

The next time you come up against the iron fist of ‘health and safety’, please remember who’s to blame.

The saddest, most evocative and most apposite picture of the state of Britain in 2014 was this image of HMS Plymouth, a fighting ship battered by war in the Nelson and Drake tradition, being towed to a Turkish breakers’ yard past a line of useless windmills, imposed on our once-free landscape by foreign diktat.

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04 August 2013 1:47 AM

The Government’s pretence of being resolute and decisive on immigration is a lie. It is almost as bad as New Labour’s secret decision to transform the country with migrants.Do they really think that hiring a couple of stupid publicity vans, fraudulently claiming that illegal migrants are in serious danger of arrest and deportation, will fool anybody? Alas, they do.Will you be fooled? I beg you not to be. I beg you, instead, to be angry and vengeful, and to make that revenge hurt, to vote UKIP as often as you can, to destroy the wretched ‘Conservative’ Party which so insults your intelligence.

It is because he knows that you are rightly worried about immigration that David Cameron is engaged on his slippery and dishonest propaganda campaign. He personally couldn’t care less about the problem.It doesn’t threaten his job or push his wages down. It doesn’t alter his neighbourhood beyond recognition, trapping him in a place where he no longer feels welcome or at ease.As he doesn’t know what Magna Carta means, and has never heard of the Bill of Rights, I think we can safely say he’s not that worried about the disappearance of our once-beloved culture of law and liberty.

He's even got a Minister – Nick Boles – whose job it is to destroy the countryside. If Britain becomes a featureless concreted-over province in a Multiculti Euroland, he won’t care.He’ll still be rich enough to afford peace and space, when they have become impossible dreams for the rest of us.For him, and those like him among the Relaxed Rich, immigration means cheap nannies and cheap restaurants.For his friends in business it means cheap and easily bullied workers. For his friends in New Labour (whose heir he is and whose seat in power he is keeping warm), it means even more.Unlike Mr Cameron, the Blairites knew what they were doing when they opened our ports to all who came.

A secret government paper, circulated among Ministers in October 2000 (but censored before being released a year later), revealed their aim was to ‘maximise the contribution of migration to the Government’s social and economic objectives’.What were those objectives? It’s easy to guess, looking at this collection of 1960s campus revolutionaries, spiced up with unrepentant ex-Trotskyists and ex-Communists, and cheered on by the anti-British London media classes.But in fact we know. A typical London liberal and New Labour speechwriter, Andrew Neather, boasted about it in October 2009 and then wished he hadn’t.He burbled about how immigration had been ‘highly positive’ for ‘middle-class Londoners’. He wrote: ‘It’s not simply a question of foreign nannies, cleaners and gardeners – although frankly it’s hard to see how the capital could function without them.’He was even franker: ‘But this wave of immigration has enriched us much more than that. A large part of London’s attraction is its cosmopolitan nature.It is so much more international now than, say, 15 years ago, and so much more heterogeneous than most of the provinces, that it’s pretty much unimaginable for us to go back.’

That’s an interesting use of ‘us’, there. He didn’t mean you, I don’t think. But above all came this admission from the heart of government, where Mr Neather once worked.Controversial: Adverts have been driven around London on vans to encourage illegal immigrants to go homeThe opening of our ports had ‘a driving political purpose: that mass immigration was the way that the Government was going to make the UK truly multicultural’.Even this apostle of modernity was a bit worried. ‘I remember coming away from some discussions with the clear sense that the policy was intended – even if this wasn’t its main purpose – to rub the Right’s nose in diversity and render their arguments out of date. That seemed to me to be a manoeuvre too far.‘Ministers were very nervous about the whole thing . . . there was a reluctance elsewhere in government to discuss what increased immigration would mean, above all for Labour’s core white working-class vote.’I happen to think this brief glimpse of the truth was the most important political revelation of our time. I believe the ideas behind it still rule.And in case you’re still fooled by Mr Cameron’s disgraceful pretence, take a look at the Commons Public Administration Committee report on the Government’s noisy claims to have cut immigration. It is devastating. It shows that the figures used by Ministers to claim they are closing the doors are little better than guesswork.

Migration into this country, legal and illegal, continues apace. The transformation of Britain into somewhere else accelerates.The official propaganda about economic benefits is mostly tripe (see an excellent analysis in Ed West’s powerful new book The Diversity Illusion). The pressure on schools, GPs, hospitals, housing and transport is huge and growing.We have been betrayed. It is not the fault of the migrants, with whom we must seek to live in harmony. But those responsible, in all the major parties, must be punished for their lies.

We were fooled once. It will be our shame if we are fooled again.

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At last... Prezza's found a job he's good at

Now we know what John Prescott was born to be – a big fat PC Plod, directing the traffic.His performance on point duty the other day – pictured left – was obviously the fulfilment of a lifetime dream.What a pity he ended up in the Cabinet instead, for him and us.

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Please let this latest grievous murder of a defenceless child not be used – yet again – as an excuse for snatching children from innocent families without evidence.Social workers who repeatedly miss real cases should be treated with caution when they level charges, not assumed to be right.

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Have you noticed how many public figures have started ending their sentences with the meaningless phrase ‘going forward’?Is it a coded signal to their alien controllers? Listen out for it and you’ll be amazed how common it is.

Be very afraid.

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Why don’t the windbags target Cairo?

If we admit that the Egyptian military coup IS a military coup, then the US, by law, has to cancel its multi-billion-dollar subsidies to Cairo.Politicians and diplomats simply refuse to state the truth, which nobody in the ‘West’ is allowed to acknowledge.

The Egyptian junta is a murderous military regime installed by violence. It kills its own people in very large numbers. The generals had a good long look at the Arab democracy we all said we wanted, and snuffed it out. Secretly, the West was pleased.I couldn’t care less, personally. But where now is William Hague, the scourge of Syria? And David Cameron, the man who overthrew Colonel Gaddafi?Or come to that, the capering, grinning Blair creature who overthrew Saddam? And the BBC, many of whose journalists wildly applauded the Arab Spring?I hear no talk of a British intervention in Egypt, and I am glad. But a great deal of self-abasement is called for from these moralising windbags, and we should demand it every time they show their faces.

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08 September 2012 10:03 PM

Get used to it. You are not safe in your own home. Just because only one judge has been silly enough to admit that he thinks burglars are brave, don’t think there aren’t hundreds more just the same.

They simply don’t have the courage to admit it. Some older judges, true, may still secretly disapprove of thieves. But they lack the principle to resign from a job where their main task is to keep criminals out of prison.

It’s the same with the police. I used to jeer that if the whole lot of them were abducted by aliens, nobody would notice. They’d vanished from our ken already.

But now they are completely in the grip of Equality and Diversity. They long for the chance to arrest someone for having the wrong thoughts about sex or religion, or for acting as if right and wrong still existed in this country.

One well-publicised couple, Tracey and Andrew Ferrie, have been released without charge after daring to defend their home against a violent and evil invasion.

But I beg you not to try it yourselves. Note that the Ferries spent three days in custody first, not far short of the real average prison sentence for a convicted criminal.

The police, the CPS and the courts still hate anyone who acts as if criminals are wrongdoers and as if they have an absolute right to their own property or peace.

Note that Daniel Mansell (now awaiting sentence after pleading guilty to raiding the Ferries’ isolated home) was ‘jailed’ for six years in February 2009. If such sentences had any relation to the truth he would not be at large. But all British prison sentences are whopping lies.

And if our prisons still punished instead of being lawless, drug-infested warehouses, Mansell would long ago have been taught the hard way that crime does not pay. As it is, he has a long career behind him of thieving and witness intimidation, and I would expect there’s a long career ahead of him too. How he must laugh at us.

And why not? I too laugh at our wobbling, jellified, whimpering apology for a criminal justice system. I hope I never need it, for I know it won’t help me or do justice to those who have wronged me.

But I fear that it will one day find a way of locking me up for expressing incorrect ideas. Partly for that reason I wouldn’t dream of lifting a finger to resist a burglar. I’d just give him a cup of tea and ask him to sign a declaration that I hadn’t hurt him. Otherwise it would be me in Belmarsh, and my burglar on the loose.

My favourite episode of British law and order dates from 1999 when some poor woman in rural Somerset had her car vandalised and went to the police. They wrote to her to say that the people who had damaged her car were victims too.

The epistle explained that the culprits were probably heroin ‘addicts’ living in bad housing who had come from broken homes. It urged her to give a thought to those less fortunate than herself.

She said: ‘That’s just not what you expect from the police.’ Well, it’s what I expect from them, and so should you if you have any sense.

Sometimes I wish they would just get on and proclaim the People’s Republic of Britain, strip away the sentimental decorations and the lingering reminders of the lost past, and do their worst.

Maybe then there would be a revolt against the self- righteous, smug elite who have turned us into a Land Fit For Burglars.

MPs shouldn't give medals - that's why we have a Monarch

It was thoughtless and wrong of the Paralympics organisers to invite politicians to hand out medals.

Half the point of having a Monarchy is that we don’t have to admire or revere Ministers or MPs, mostly jumped-up careerists and backstairs-crawlers.

I wouldn’t myself want to receive a raffle prize from a politician, let alone a well-earned award for excellence and hard work. What if the award-winner doesn’t share the politics of the Minister involved?

I’m all in favour of booing politicians. These days they don’t get heckled or booed nearly enough, which is why they get so above themselves.

One of the greatest moments of modern times was the Blair Creature’s rough handling by the Women’s Institute.

And I don’t see why a really distinguished and admirable person such as Ellie Simmonds, whom we can all happily cheer, should be expected to act as a human shield for any Prime Minister.

Some religions are more equal...

What Christians in Britain have to understand is that this is not a Christian country any more. It’s no good going to the Court of Human Rights.

Harriet Harman’s Equalities Act 2010 (backed, as I ceaselessly remind you, by the Useless Tories and particularly by Mrs Theresa May) made all religions equal.

That means Christianity in this country has no greater legal status than Mormonism, Buddhism, Jainism or Scientology – and rather lower status than Islam, because our Government and Establishment are scared stiff of Islam.

Precisely because Christianity used to be dominant, that means that the authorities will seize every chance they can to take it down a peg or two.

This process is only just beginning. You’ll be amazed by how much more there is yet to come, in schools, laws, broadcasting, policing and – I hesitate to mention it, but it will come – the Coronation of our next Monarch.

Well, that’s the end of the great Cameroon experiment, then. The Tory Party is as deceased as it always was. By moving the coffins around in the crypt, the Prime Minister has not made his Cabinet any less dead.

They never had any purpose but getting office. Having got office, they can only snivel into their handkerchiefs when they lose it.

Meanwhile, the next – Lib-Lab – coalition is already starting to form. There’ll be more snivelling then.

Yet again newspapers refer to a lawless murder as an ‘execution’. Please stop doing this. An execution is a just punishment for a heinous crime, and if we still had them, we’d have fewer murders and less violence in general.

There's an old saying in Whitehall: ‘Never let a good crisis go to waste.’ This means that bad times are always a good excuse to do something unpopular and bad that a well-funded lobby has wanted for ages.

Hence the third runway, and the dismantling of suburban planning laws. You can’t do anything about it, except loathe and despise those responsible. It’s all part of national decline.

Peter Hitchens will be at the Henley Literary Festival at 4.30pm on Sunday September 30 to talk about his new book, The War We Never Fought: The British Establishment’s Surrender To Drugs. For tickets go to henleyliterary festival.co.uk or call 01189 724700.

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26 July 2012 9:22 PM

Is it in the film of ‘Far From the ‘Madding Crowd’ that the closing scenes show Farmer Boldwood, condemned to death for the murder of a rival in love, sitting gaunt in his narrow cell, listening to the prison carpenter making his coffin? Something like that. This rather unpleasant image comes to mind again as I read a pamphlet I wrongly neglected when it first came out ‘The Rise of the Equalities Industry’ by Peter Saunders, published last November by one of the better think tanks, Civitas. We are not sitting in a cell. Nobody has told us we are to die in the morning. But if we listen carefully we can hear the hammering, sawing and planing of the crude coffin in which our liberty is to be nailed down and buried. Or perhaps it is the scaffold on which it is to be guillotined (no honest British gallows for this execution). We listen, we don’t understand what we hear, and we do nothing. Probably it is too late to do anything anyway.

The pamphlet attracted very little attention at the time, as such work often does. Finding it on one of the slithering heaps of unread material in my office (and planning, as I am to take two weeks away from my desk to write the index of my own new book) I thought ‘This could be interesting’, and picked it up. So gripped was I that I was still studying it two days later during the interval of a very fine open-air ‘Hamlet’ (performed in the majestic courtyard of the Bodleian Library in Oxford last week).

I think Professor Saunders (interesting as he is) does not know the half of it. The real nature of these matters is known only to those of us who were part of the revolutionary project and have defected from it. But he has done a lot of the necessary spadework, and those who read his work will find they have at least understood the architecture of the new totalitarianism which is slowly but relentlessly rising out of the ruins of British law, the wreckage of our mixed constitution, the remains of our limited government, and the void where our impartial civil service and competent, thrifty local government used to stand. If we had a properly educated middle class, which knew how to think instead of what to think, I don’t think this project could succeed. But the enemies of liberty began, very wisely, by wrecking the schools and the universities.

What’s it about? First of all, it comes close to grasping why egalitarianism is such a danger. For me, ‘equality’ is not a particularly attractive objective anyway. Why should it be? But I always find people are shocked when I say so.

Let me explain . Equality before God simply exists, for the religious believer, as an absolute in Eternity. It reminds us that no human worth, achievement, wealth, fame, beauty, honour or praise has any importance before the throne of the Heavenly Grace. We brought nothing into this world and we can assuredly carry nothing out. We should live our lives in this knowledge. But the idea that this should in any way be reflected in some sort of absolute material equality, in this life, is fatuous. We all have different gifts, and in many cases these gifts do not shine very brightly in this world, however glorious they may be in the next (and vice versa). Kindness, hospitality, charity, generosity are all required from those to whom much is given. Equality is not.

Equality before the law is more persuasive, and is certainly an ideal to be aimed at, even in the certain knowledge that it might be approached but cannot be attained. But any practical, wise and experienced person knows that this equality is a fantasy, and will always remain so. Also, that any serious attempt to achieve it will suffer from the usual defects of Utopianism – it will fail, people will be killed and imprisoned in the process, and at the end of it the law will be more unequal than it was to start with.

Material equality is plainly absurd, cannot be brought into existence and is only maintained as a propaganda fiction in societies whose elites keep their privileges secret through censorship, and preserve them inviolate through terror. It is not desirable, for if all are rewarded equally, and people vary in their talents and energies, then many will suffer, talents will wither unused and corruption will be widespread . Some instances : under the Soviet system, all doctors, good or bad, were paid the same. It did not take long for the acute citizen to find out who the good ones were, but their services could only be secured through bribes. The same rule applied to places in better schools, or the allocations of apartments in better districts. Elite privilege carried more weight than bribery, but was in itself corrupt, as it secured the silence and uncritical support of those (the ‘Nomenklatura’) whom the elite admitted to privilege.

I know more about this than most, because during my time in Soviet Moscow I was able to live in a Nomenklatura apartment, with the Brezhnev and Andropov families as my near neighbours. I have never had such magnificent quarters – 14-foot ceilings, chandeliers, oak parquet floors, a sweeping view of Moscow from the University to the Kremlin on one side, and of the Moscow River on the other. And this was in the Homeland of Equality. As a foreigner I could not take advantage of the dacha (country cottage) in the forest outside Moscow , which came with the apartment, as it was too close to an anti-ballistic missile launch site which I was not supposed to see. Nor did I qualify for entry to the special secret restaurants where the elite ate, or the special elite shops where they bought their privileged supplies of fresh meat and vegetables. Nor was I allowed to use the special hospitals, in lush gardens behind high walls, where the elite were treated. But these things existed, and my experience of this secret inequality was only the foothills. The truly powerful Communists lived in secluded woodland mansions with battalions of servants, and roared down the city streets along special (Olympic-style?) lanes, which were heated in winter so that they never iced over. So much for material equality. Later, as the Bolshevik privileges faded, I had to pay for my Moscow privileges with hard cash, the way you do anywhere else.

Professor Saunders explains that the equality pursued by the British government is not, as it pretends, the equality of treatment (which is more pernicious than it sounds); nor is it equality of opportunity (which is the only kind compatible with a free society). It is *equality of outcome*.

Professor Saunders shows that this is the hidden, third element on which the entire strategy is based’ . It is clear, when you study the actual rules, that equality of outcome is the aim (the attempt to get universities to lower their standards so as to equalise their intake is the clearest and most blatant example of this).

But ‘nothing is said explicitly about …equality of outcomes’.

He shows his lack of knowledge of the enemy by saying ‘’Unequal outcomes unthinkingly get used as evidence of unequal treatment’.

I challenge that ‘unthinkingly’. There are undoubtedly people who have thought about this, though they do not include the Equalities Minister, Mrs Theresa May. Mrs May, once a doughty opponent of all-women shortlists for MPs (She said ‘I’m totally opposed to Labour’s idea of all-women shortlists and I think they are an insult to women. I‘ve competed equally with men in my career and I have been happy to do so in politics too’) mysteriously and so far as I know without any explanation later reversed her position, just in time for the Cameron era. She then more or less welcomed Harriet Harman’s Equalities Bill, the legislative basis for the greatest expansion of thought control in modern Britain.

She said: ‘I look forward to working constructively with them on ensuring that we have workable and practical legislation to provide for a fair society.’ Miss Harman thanked her for her ‘broad welcome for the package’.

No wonder then that the Coalition is now ’committed to the most radical form of egalitarian thinking – the belief in equal outcomes’. The Tory party, having failed to oppose the Harman Bill, is now finding that it is bound to follow it. No use blaming Nick Clegg. They sold the pass long before they got together with the Liberal Democrats and should stop pretending otherwise. As ‘equality’ has now started to apply to class as well as to sex, race, sexual orientation, we are fast reaching the stage when an economic policy might have to be rejected because it allegedly threatens the equal rights of ‘disadvantaged’ economic groups. The courts might well rule that it did so. People’s Republic, here we come.

Professor Saunders also points out that this process has not been the result of popular demand, but the wilful programme of the 1960s university generation, in London and Brussels . ‘For almost fifty years, progressive politicians have been introducing laws designed to *change* the way people think and behave about issues like these, rather than to reflect them. Especially in more recent times, the law has been used as an ideological battering ram, both by Westminster politicians and by Brussels, to forcibly redefine social norms’.

He traces the salami-slicing method by which a small body designed to stop racial discrimination has grown into the enormous and costly Equality and Human Rights Commission (itself a branch of the unjustly-ignored Fundamental Rights Agency based in Vienna). From protecting people against insults and outrages, it has taken on the task of ‘promoting’ equality, and now increasingly it has the power and the money not merely to promote it but to enforce it, through employment codes of practice supported by trade unions and decisive in the outcomes of tribunals, fines, the withholding of government contracts and ultimately the civil and criminal law.

Equality, of course, doesn’t mean what it used to mean. Linked with ’diversity’ it means that Christianity is no longer the accepted religion of this country, but one among many faiths, equal to them all and (like the rest) slightly more equal than Islam, because the British state is nervous of Islam and does not want to upset it. The effect of this is actually to make Christianity a slighted and discouraged faith, as it has to be reminded from time to time of its lost status and its new subservient role. State employees, as we have found in a series of cases, can get into trouble for trying to spread a Christian message at work or to act at work according to Christian principles (how long before this applies to those who do it too noisily outside work?). I have yet to hear of this happening to members of any other faith. But I am sure that there will soon be a concerted assault on the remaining Christian presence in the state schools, beginning with dilution of entry requirements and the power to give preference in hiring teachers to members of a faith, and ending in effective abolition.

I suspect a similar fate faces the English language in time. The estate of Marriage is also now ‘equal’ to ‘any relationship’ , which one again means that it has been stripped of its former privileges and needs to be reminded of its new, diminished status by being treated with some coldness by bureaucracy, and not acknowledged in official documents (I believe the words ‘husband’ and wife’ are increasingly disappearing from forms , replaced by ‘partner’).

From a legitimate concern for the victims of racial discrimination, what Peter Simple long ago called ‘The Race Relations Industry’ has jumped the logic barrier into other areas which are wholly different (see my chapter on the important differences between – for example – racism, sexism and homophobia in my book ‘The Cameron Delusion’, originally published in hardback as ‘The Broken Compass’) for a demolition of the idea that the three are the same, or can or should be treated in the same way. There’s also an exploration of the important switch from ‘racialism’, namely a moronic, indefensible discrimination on the grounds of skin colour to ‘racism’ (in which racial prejudice is falsely equated with defence of indigenous cultures) , which I recommend to any interested reader.

As Professor Saunders points out, decades have gone by during which there has been no serious intellectual challenge to this wobbling mountain of tripe. Positive discrimination exists in all but name. Even supposedly conservative private firms adopt the rules of equality and diversity.

But the EHRC is in fact the nucleus of a Thought Police. Since the Macpherson report dispensed with any need for evidence for an accusation of ‘racism’ ( the same of course applies to the other isms and phobias) the subjective wounded feelings of anyone can create a thought crime. The adoption of ‘racially aggravated’ categories of crime, with much heavier sentences than non-aggravated offences, has given the police and the CPS enormous power to pursue people who say out loud (or are accused of doing so) things which the new elite don’t like. The recent bizarre prosecution of Cinnamon Heathcote Drury, charged with ‘racially aggravated assault’ of a Muslim woman in Tesco (thrown out by a jury) shows how vulnerable anyone is to such accusations. Yes, she was acquitted. But many people wouldn’t or couldn’t have risked a jury trial, something increasingly difficult to obtain.

And the modern British jury is an unreliable defence. Political correctness, egalitarianism and poor education have all found their way into the jury room, and the majority verdict has destroyed the power of the obstinate Henry Fonda character to resist a rush to judgement. ( see the chapter ’Twelve Angry Persons’ in my book ‘The Abolition of Liberty’).

Actually, I suspect we are just at the very beginning of a process which will end with a true Thought Police. The Police themselves are feeling their way, cautiously. They would like to act more, but it is too soon. Remember those bizarre inquiries one Welsh force made about public figures who had allegedly been disrespectful of the Welsh? I asked them what law they were applying. They never answered. But I suspect they had in mind Section 5 of the Public order Act of 1986, a sloppily drafted and silly piece of work originally aimed at football hooligans (now the subject of a worthy campaign for reform whose fortunes it will be interesting to observe) . Section 5 makes it an offence to use “threatening, abusive or insulting words or behaviour, or disorderly behaviour” or to display “any writing, sign or other visible representation which is threatening, abusive or insulting” within the hearing or sight of a person “likely to be caused harassment, alarm or distress thereby”. Combined with Lord Macpherson’s view on what constitutes a racist incident, this is of course irresistible, especially once police, CPS, the Judges’ bench and the Appeal courts have all been thoroughly politically corrected, a process close to completion.

I think the police officers who in 2005 and 2006 investigated various public figures who had said unfashionable things about homosexuality (one of these was Sir Iqbal Sacranie, then head of the Muslim Council of Britain, another was the Christian pro-marriage campaigner Lynette Burrows ) on the radio were also relying on the same Act. Again, they never followed through (see below for the reason why not) . At the time they said homophobic racist and domestic incidents were ‘priority crimes’. They then told the media ‘We can confirm that a member of the public brought to our attention an incident which he believed to be homophobic. All parties have been spoken to by the police. No allegation of crime has been made. A report has been taken but is now closed. Note that ‘which he believed to be homophobic’. In law, that’s all that is necessary.

The Public Order Act 1986 is the law used against the elderly preacher Harry Hammond, who was arrested (yes, he was) after being pelted with lumps of mud, pushed to the ground, pelted with mud and abused by homosexual rights campaigners (who were not arrested). He was then successfully prosecuted before magistrates for annoying them. An appeal, held unusually after his death, failed. He had held up a placard bearing the words ‘Stop Homosexuality’, which was his basic message, He had offered no personal insults. One fascinating feature of this case is that the two police officers at the scene disagreed openly about what to do, and have evidence on opposite sides in the courtroom. The younger, more PC police officers who are now pretty much universal have for long been trained in equality and diversity. There is a steady dribble of cases of preachers and others arrested and sometimes tried for speech code offences of this kind. My guess is that the police and the CPS are restrained mainly by the existence of a strong free press.

Well, listen to the sound of saws and chisels. Lord Justice Leveson is busy making a coffin for that. And when the strong free press is gone, wait for the knock on the door. Antonio Gramsci is well on the way to scoring his first victory, and the European regions on these islands will be the first to learn that revolutions don’t always happen through noisy and violent convulsions. Indeed, the most effective revolutions take place while people are looking the other way, as everyone has been. All the buildings are left standing. But the laws, liberties, traditions, morals, faith and loyalty are destroyed, and carted away to some place of desolation where the remnants can be desecrated and burned. Quomodo sedet sola Civitas (you can have fun looking that up).

NB : I expect that this will be my last posting (apart from my Mail on Sunday column which will be posted as usual) till after the Olympics. . I may be tempted to engage in other verbal combat, but I may not.

12 November 2011 10:03 PM

If anyone had ever asked us, we would have said that we did not want millions of people from Asia, the Balkans or the dead Soviet Empire migrating to this country.

This would have had nothing to do with bigotry, or racism or any of the other rude words flung at the British people by their ruling class of snooty elite liberals.

It does not take much to see that mass immigration is a daft idea. The most basic argument for it – that it helps the economy – is false.

We rightly complain that young people cannot get work. So why import foreigners to do that work, while paying our own children to take to crime and sit at home smoking dope?It makes no sense at all, not least because the South East of England is now one of the most crowded places on Earth, and feels that way.

And yet, here’s the mystery. Nobody wants it, and it is damaging – but it keeps on happening.

Some people were stupid enough to think that this was just a Labour problem. They were not paying attention.

The Tory Party has been keenly pro-immigration for decades.

It made this view clear as long ago as 1958 when party stewards violently silenced anti-immigration protesters at a Blackpool rally addressed by Harold Macmillan.

Many independent witnesses were shocked at the blood-spattered savagery of the beatings handed out to the hecklers.

They should not have been. The more liberal the Tory Party gets, the more ruthless it has to be to its own natural supporters. As usual, the amazing thing is that so many of those supporters carry on voting for it.

And so it goes on. I doubt if we shall ever know exactly who is to blame for the latest border fiasco. Theresa May, the liberal, PC Home Secretary, is protected by a mysterious media bodyguard of flatterers and defenders. But the reason for the mess remains the same as it has always been.

The elite wish to pretend that they sympathise with us about the problem.

But secretly they want to change the country for ever, and see mass immigration as the best way of doing this.

Those figures showing that most illegal migrants who arrive here are allowed to stay, or that foreign criminals are not deported, or that passport checks were skimped, are not evidence of government failure. Nothing much will be done about them.

They will be nearly as bad next year and the year after.

They are evidence that the real policy is and always has been to act against our wishes and interests. Everything else is a pretence.

The truth is the opposite of the public stance. It is typical that our major airports have all now got huge new signs proclaiming 'UK Border', just at the moment when that border has more or less ceased to exist.

One day, perhaps, those to blame for this disgrace will be punished. But I think it will by then be too late.

We are too trusting for our own good.

We ALL pay a terrible price for Britain's lethal motorways

If a train crash cost as many lives and hurt as many people as the M5 pile-up, the whole rail system would be paralysed by inquiries and speed restrictions.

In fact, our horribly dangerous roads still see thousands of needless deaths a year, but nobody does anything because all the misery comes in small packets, so that one or two homes mourn, and the rest of the nation carries on unaffected.

We do not see a pattern. The futile attempt to blame a firework display for the motorway horror is an example of this. The real problem is that such roads are unavoidably crammed with vehicles that are much too close together, travelling much too fast.

Just try driving on a British road at a reasonable speed, and at a sensible distance from the car in front. See how long it takes before some moron is nudging your back bumper and flashing his lights, or before another moron cuts into the space you have left.

As for fog, it is not exactly a surprise in November, is it? Yet since motorways were introduced here, people have driven too fast in such fog. It is amazing more people aren’t killed.

I’d plough up all the motorways in the country, and rebuild the rail network that Beeching trashed. Motorways are a horrible idea. They have ruined our countryside and our cities, and it’s no surprise to me that Adolf Hitler liked them so much.

But as long as we have them, the police should be made to patrol them properly, so that sane people have some protection against the thoughtless, homidical chancers who currently rule our roads.

Today, maths dunces like me don't stand a chance

I was never any good at maths. Only the dedicated patience of a great teacher helped me get the lowest possible grade at O-level.

These days I probably would not even know how bad I was at maths. There would be nobody around who could tell.

When Channel 4’s Dispatches programme tested 155 teachers in 18 schools, they found that most of them could not do simple calculations.How could such people have helped me? You cannot teach maths if you are hopeless at it yourself.

And I suspect the same goes, in many cases, for reading, writing and spelling.

Our schools have now been so bad for so long that those in charge are themselves ignorant. Worse, they may be unaware of it, or scared to admit it.

Do they fail to correct spelling mistakes because they don’t know how to spell themselves?

Do they struggle to teach reading because they are barely literate? It is all too possible. And how can such people have the blazing enthusiasm for books, history or science that makes the young want to learn?

It is useless to blame these teachers. They, like their pupils, are the victims of a cruel, 50-year experiment on defenceless human beings.

That experiment, known as ‘progressive education’, has conclusively failed. There is no better evidence than the vast disaster of our state comprehensive system that discipline, rigour, authority, selection and tradition are vital in the schooling of the young.

But the mad experiment seems to have smashed common sense, knowledge and thought so completely that there is now nobody left in the education establishment who is able to stop it. And so it goes on and on and on, wrecking lives and hopes.

All this time, the rich and powerful are exempt from it, and don’t care.

* * *

What can I do about the fact that my new mobile phone has opinions and wants to impose them on me? It is a paid-up member of the Global Warming cult.

Instead of just telling me that it is fully charged, it sternly orders me to save energy by unplugging the charger from the wall. Well, as I don’t believe in man-made global warming and reckon the amount of power involved is tiny, I shall of course ignore it.

But how long before it starts reporting me to the authorities?

If you want to comment on Peter Hitchens, click on Comments and scroll down

08 October 2011 11:18 PM

The gruesome carnival of the party conferences is now over, so I can stop taking my nausea-suppressing pills at last. Do you have any idea how fraudulent these things are? They are sealed off from the people by police guards and high fences.

The applause is phoney and stage-­managed. Even the arguments are faked. The vast halls are half-empty, and reached through bazaars of lobbyists for various forms of greed and folly.

The speeches themselves are seldom ­written by the people who obediently deliver them. There is no real life. All three major ­parties are living corpses, kept walking by transfusions from the taxpayer, dodgy billionaires or trade-union funds.

Meanwhile, the media coverage has mostly degenerated into pathetic partisan bootlicking of the party in power, matched by equally pathetic partisan savaging of the one that is out of power.

No doubt, Edward Miliband made a pretty dreadful speech in Liverpool the week before last. But it was nothing like as bad as the hogwash that gushed and gurgled out of the Prime Minister’s smirking mouth on Wednesday. As an exhortation to slackers and grumblers in some public-school football

team, it would have been average. As a statement of policy and aims from the Prime Minister of a middling nuclear power, it was pitiful.

Nor did it see fit to mention that the very next day the Bank of England would embark on a desperate plan (for once the word ‘desperate’ is justified here) to deliberately provoke yet more inflation.

Let me remind you of what one of our greatest economists, Lord Keynes, once wrote about this awful thing: ‘Lenin is said to have declared that the best way to destroy the capitalist system was to debauch the currency.

‘By a continuing process of inflation, governments can ­confiscate, secretly and unobserved, an important part of the wealth of their citizens.’

This colossal, unfair stealth tax on the prudent, to pay for the folly of the imprudent, is what we are reduced to. This is, as it turns out, Plan B. We have driven the country and the people deep into debts that can never be paid. So we will shrink the debt by shrinking everyone’s money.

So much for the careful, the thrifty, the provident who foolishly thought the Tories were their friends.

Their savings, their pensions, their long years of caution and restraint all shrivel to a handful of change in a surprisingly short time.

This crisis wasn’t made yesterday, or even in the Blair-Brown years. It has been in the making for decades, as sup­posedly Conservative politicians have refused to get the Welfare State under control, refused to release this country from the chains loaded on to it by the EU, and risked all on the bubble of the housing market.

Of these people it has been rightly said that: ‘They could not dig, they dared not rob, and so they lied to please the mob.’ I hope I live long enough to see it carved on their tombstones.

Thought Police are still feeling collars

Much more should have been made of the amazing treatment of the Tory MP Andrew Tyrie, a thoughtful and distinguished man. Mr Tyrie made the bad mistake of believing that free speech still exists in his party, and criticised the leadership. He was then taken into custody by a pair of Downing Street thought police officers, and soon afterwards emerged with his mind completely changed. Humiliating pictures of this event then found their way to the newspapers. This is how Blairism operated – and still operates.

Knox deserved to go free – just like ‘Lockerbie Bomber’

As it happens, I don’t think the Italian state ever came close to proving beyond reasonable doubt that Amanda Knox was guilty of murder. So, in a general way, I am pleased that she has been freed.

But compare the frenzy of interest over this rather unimportant case with the strange silence over the equally dubious – but far more important – conviction of the so-called Lockerbie Bomber, the Libyan Abdelbaset Al Megrahi.

One of the key witnesses against him has since admitted to lying in court.

Another, described by a senior judge as ‘an apple short of a picnic’, shockingly received a $2 million (£1.28 million) reward after giving evidence that many experts regard as highly dubious.

I suspect Megrahi’s release had more to do with the fear of a final, successful appeal revealing inconvenient facts than it did with ­ British oil interests. If the US had wanted to stop him being freed, they could have. After all, they made us surrender to the IRA.

** DOES Richard Dawkins exist? The noted foe of religion seems set to be absent (despite many requests that he take part) from a planned debate with William Lane Craig, a leading American Christian philosopher (a number of other anti-God blowhards have also declined to debate with Craig).

To tease Professor Dawkins out of his Oxford lair, organisers of Craig’s tour plan to put advertisements on the city’s buses next week proclaiming ‘There’s probably no Dawkins.’ In the age of BCE and CE, it’s nice to see the other side hitting back.

** IN the supposed ‘Catgate’ row between Theresa May and Kenneth Clarke, who won? I don’t know, but I know who lost. We lost. This country is still subject to the European Convention on Human Rights, and to the views of judges on how it is to be interpreted.

Plenty of people who should never have been here in the first place will continue to be allowed by the courts to stay, even if they behave very badly.

But a lot of voters have been given the entirely fake impression that Mrs May is going to do something significant about this. I very much doubt it. I advise you to check on progress a year from now.

** MEET the new young MPs of the Labour Party and the Tory Party and you would find it very hard to tell the difference between them, if they weren’t actually wearing badges.

They’re not very interested in politics, though they know what views to adopt to get them up the ladder of ambition most quickly. They certainly have far more in common with each other than they do with a normal British person of any class.

Searching for any differences between the Labour and Tory parties this autumn, I can come up with only one. I don’t think Labour would have dared to devastate our Armed Forces with the disastrous and irreparable cuts visited on them by Mr Cameron.

** IF I have to read another word of praise for the magazine Private Eye on its 50th anniversary, I think I shall feel ill. It was, long ago, part of the cultural revolution that turned Britain into what it now is. These days it is a smug and very profitable organ of the new establishment, made all the worse by a pretence that it is still brave and dangerous.

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22 May 2007 2:36 PM

Here is a sad story from the days when good grammar schools were being smashed up all over the country. It is actually written by someone who supported the change, as you can see. Here she is recounting what happened when her girls' grammar school was merged into a mixed sex comprehensive.

"Gradually old (and often outworn) standards were allowed to slip - we no longer stood if senior teachers entered the room....

"Greater repercussions were felt the following year when more Shotover (secondary modern) pupils arrived. Feuds started when staunch Grammar and Secondary Modern girls clashed over territory. The boys had the run of a quiet school and, with no seniors to crack whips, wreaked havoc. Windows were broken, the ...bicycle store had to be closed...few of the teachers were used to handling boisterous teenagers...Academic standards fell because joint CSE/O level classes were timetabled, which combined people who wanted to study with people who quite definitely did not. Teachers left because of the changes in the atmosphere at the school and, looking back now, I can see that the unrest affecting both staff and pupils left little peace of mind to concentrate on study."

It is only fair to the author of this memoir to add that she goes on to say that eventually things settled down, and some lessons were learned. But she adds, "Although the premises are the same, the schools before and after the changeover are completely different entities. Comparison is therefore almost impossible and certainly unfair. I think, however, that the present system may be more realistic than the old one; outside schools or universities everyone is thrown together, and people have to find their own level of skill rather than fit in with someone else's idea of where they should be."

I would comment that schools are there to educate, not to socialise people, and I would rather have a little social awkwardness and a well-educated population than an allegedly classless society (which isn't really classless at all) and a badly-educated population.

What makes this spare, sad account of an avoidable, mournful little moment in our history is that the school involved was being attended, at exactly this time, by Theresa May, or Theresa Brasier as she was then. It was Holton Park girls' grammar school, a few miles outside the City of Oxford (close to Forest Hill where John Milton's wife grew up) now long merged into the Wheatley Park comprehensive. Mrs May was for a while the Tory shadow Education Secretary. She was on BBC Question Time on Thursday last week, defending David Cameron's policy on grammar schools.

Now, here's the interesting thing. Mrs May joined Holton Grammar at the age of 13 (later than the usual 11) from a private school, in 1969. She then had about two years of grammar school education. And she completed her schooling at a new comprehensive, successfully enough to win a place at St Hugh's, then a women-only college at Oxford. But in 'Dod's Parliamentary Companion', the more detailed 'Who's Who' for MPs, she sums up her secondary schooling as 'Educated at Wheatley Park Comprehensive School'. As you see, it's a lot more complicated than that. And I don't think she needed to use the word 'comprehensive' when describing her school.

Why do so? A lot of Labour MPs who went to grammar schools carefully hide this by just giving the name of the school without saying what sort it was. It is easy to see why the party that actively destroyed the grammars would behave like this. But why should a Tory be so keen to be seen as part of the revolution? I suspect it is because she thinks it politically wise. Senior mainstream Tories have for years accepted the comprehensive revolution as an unalterable fact, which is one of the reasons they have done little or nothing to reverse it. But they are sensitive about it, as so many of their supporters would like to see the grammars back. To mention that you have had even a bit of a grammar school education is, oddly, more sensitive than to say that you went to Eton or Shrewsbury.

I'll turn, in a while, to the arguments for grammar schools. But first it's important to see why this causes so much trouble in the Tory Party - and why in my view it may well cause the end of David Cameron's long honeymoon with a party he privately despises.

It is dangerous because it reminds people of something they prefer to ignore, out of politeness. The leadership of the Tory Party doesn't like, or specially understand, its membership or its voters. Senior Tories are mostly either Toffs or intellectual snobs, who enjoy the company of their Labour counterparts much more than they enjoy meeting their suburban constituents.

Tory conferences have always been specially ghastly because you have to watch men you know to be pro-EU, multicultural softy social liberals making clunky speeches they don't believe, about patriotism and limiting immigration and cracking down on crime. The amazing thing is that this brazen dishonesty almost always works, and wins the required thunderous applause. Only once, when Michael Portillo tried to identify himself with the SAS, has it gone seriously down the plumbing. I often think that Mr Portillo never really recovered from it, and all his subsequent wanderings and reinventions resulted from it. Suddenly he had exposed to everyone the naked fraud that lay at the heart of the Tory Party, and the ghastly sight was unforgettable for all involved. Mr Portillo and the Tory Party each learned quite a lot about each other. Sadly too few people learned any general lessons from this about the Tories.

But now they may. David Cameron and his supposedly brainy Education spokesman, David Willetts, are trying to suck up to Liberal Democrat voters, who they think are the key to their future - and who are much more their type of people than Tory voters.

To do this, they have long sought a noisy, but politically meaningless battle with the crusty colonels of the Tory Party, as they imagine them to be. They think that such a battle will encourage Liberal Democrat voters to return to the Tory Party, which they apparently regard as intolerant, racist, homophobic, etc. I suspect Mr Cameron of having hoped to provoke Norman Tebbit into resignation or furious attack, but the old polecat is much too cunning and wily to be manipulated in this way.

So, to provoke a general insurrection by the supposed crusties, whom they then hoped to mow down with fusillades of modernist derision, they picked grammar schools as the subject for battle. It appeared cost free, since they were never really in favour of them anyway, to come out against them as a cure for the seething, unjust mess which is British secondary education. Mr Cameron is much too grand to have any idea why anyone should care about this subject. Mr Willetts suffers from that wisdom-free sort of cleverness that means he can persuade himself of nine impossible things before breakfast, if asked nicely.

It wasn't new. Mr Cameron had said it before. He didn't need to do it again. And he duly got his public quarrel. But I think it is much bigger than he intended or expected, and that - though he has stuck absolutely to his original arrogant posture - it is going to cost him much more than it gains.

Outside the Tory Party and its supporters, school selection is actually regarded as a closed issue. A few liberal commentators may praise Mr Cameron vaguely, but that is all. They long ago decided that grammars were wrong and bad. But inside the Tory Party, and among Tory voters, it is not.

It is perfectly true that the very rich can buy their way out of comprehensive schooling. But most Tory voters are not rich. They are middle class, and not always at the fat end of it.

And the middle class, increasingly, cannot afford school fees. And they are also directly and sharply aware that the Blair/Blunkett claims of improvement have turned out to be empty. What can they do? They are powerless to help their own children, a horrible position to be in. Private school fees, which are rising fast, are beyond them. So are the prices of houses in the catchment areas of better schools. They are in the terrible position of knowing that their local comprehensive will not merely fail their children, but quite possibly damage them, and that they can do nothing about it. This is not snobbery.

Grammar schools mixed the classes as never before, but raised people up. Comprehensives have the opposite purpose, having been designed with the specific aim of creating a classless society, in which the middle class would be the main losers, as they are in all such egalitarian arrangements. Many such schools have an ethos actively hostile to achievement, plus a great deal of very nasty low-intensity bullying directed against anyone who is even slightly different. And they have weak authority, often in vast establishments, so that little can be done about either of these things.

For such people, the idea of a new grammar school in every town - now extinguished - represented a real hope for their beloved children and grandchildren. Nor are they wrong to think this way. A friend of mine was told last week by a (very left-wing) teacher of his acquaintance that he has watched bright children suffer year after year in comprehensive schools, which simply cannot create the facilities in which they can be properly taught. Over the past 40 years, this must mean millions of bright boys and girls have had their talents wasted, a tragedy for them, and a disaster for the country.

Mr Cameron simply has no understanding of this pain at all. He is the butterfly upon the road, preaching contentment to the toad as it groans in pain beneath the harrow's teeth. That is why he deserves everything he gets.

Leave aside the much bigger issue of whether a selective system would be better for everyone, which I believe it would (and will come to). He just hasn't a clue what his own supporters are going through. That is why he has misjudged so badly and, when he fails (as he is bound to do) a lot of people will reckon the beginning of his failure from last week.

****************************

Now, in the form of questions and answers, I should like to go through the argument about grammar schools, and say why they should and can be brought back throughout the kingdom.

What was so good about grammar schools?

They worked. Let us be clear that they were not perfect. A lot of bright children from poor homes did not get into them. But a significant number did. There were not enough grammar schools - provision was very patchy, so that it was much harder to get into grammars in some counties and cities than others. The secondary moderns to which 11-plus failures went were often very poor schools. The technical schools planned in 1944 were never built in any numbers. But one thing is quite certain - abolishing grammar schools did not increase the number of bright children from poor homes getting a good education.

If they were so good, why did we get rid of them at all?

A fascinating question. David Cameron maintains that selection was unpopular with voters. I can find no evidence of this, or that it was a big issue in the 1964 election which put a pro-comprehensive Labour Party in office. I think the attack on grammars was driven by leftist dogma, and the pretence that somehow destroying the grammar schools would improve the lot of those who didn't go to them, an idea which is obviously quite mad as soon as you think about it, and has been proved to be mad by the results. The inventor of Comprehensive Schools (who also invented the expression) was Sir Graham Savage, a civil servant who wanted Britain to emulate the American High School system because it would be more 'democratic'. Savage recommended this in the 1920s after a long visit to New York State and Ohio, but found few takers until after World War Two, when he was involved in setting up the early comprehensives in London. Savage always accepted that there would be a decline in quality, but he never realised how great it would be.

What about the Labour Party?

To begin with, in 1945, they were in favour of grammars and put into action the 1944 Education Act which the wartime coalition had passed. Most people in those days rightly saw the provision of free grammar education, for all who could pass an exam, as a great step forward. Only later did Labour decide it was in favour of comprehensives. In fact, the switch came in the 1950s, as many Labour intellectuals began to see that nationalising industries wasn't a specially good way of making the country more socialist. They really hated the private schools, but only a dictatorship could destroy them. They could restrict them to the rich by abolishing the tax concessions that helped the middle classes pay the fees (Roy Jenkins later did this as Chancellor, and the current government has found and is finding, other ways to make private schooling even more expensive and exclusive). But they couldn't kill them entirely.

It was easier to attack the grammars, as that could be done without confiscation or force. Anthony Crosland, the privately educated author of 'the Future of Socialism' never understood how disastrous his enthusiasm for comprehensives would be. It is clear from that book that he thought the comprehensives would all be streamed, and continue the same sort of rigorous education that the grammars had provided. But the left-wing enthusiasts had other ideas. They were motivated mainly by egalitarian politics, not by educational theory. They believed in 'mixed-ability' classes and were also opposed to old-fashioned discipline. And, since the comprehensive revolution coincided with an enormous expansion in the teaching profession, to cope with the great post-war baby bulge then reaching the secondary schools, they were able to introduce these new ideas much more easily than if the profession had remained as it was.

What is the evidence that grammars were good?

The best evidence comes from the vast number of people now in the professions, politics, the arts, the theatre, literature, journalism and TV who came from very ordinary backgrounds and were lifted up to the top, mainly by the grammar school education they wouldn't otherwise have had. Michael Howard, Neil Kinnock, Gordon Brown, David Puttnam, Alan Bennett, Dudley Moore, Cherie Blair are just a few examples snatched almost at random. Many others, not so spectacular, helped make us so pre-eminent in science that in the late 1950s and 1960s the USA raided our universities for talent on such a large scale that it became known as the 'Brain Drain'. As for university entrance, if you combine Direct Grant schools and grammar schools, state-educated children were gaining something like 65% of places at Oxford and Cambridge by the end of the 1960s, on a rising curve - without any special measures being taken to favour them. This dropped away from the mid-1970s on as grammars began to be closed. Recent research shows that the state schools which now do gain places at Oxbridge are mostly selective in one form or another. Bog-standard comprehensives barely figure. In Northern Ireland, where selection is still pretty much universal, working class children do better than their equivalents on the comprehensive mainland and results in general are better.

Wasn't the eleven-plus very cruel? Surely it was wrong to throw a child on the scrapheap for failing a test at the age of eleven?

Yes, it was. And yes, the Secondary Moderns were often awful. But it is a very strange, not to say unhinged, response to this to spend billions of pounds destroying almost all the grammar schools and then creating a national system of even bigger and more uncontrollable secondary moderns, so that everyone without rich parents is now treated as badly as an eleven-plus failure was in the 1960s, if not worse. By the mid-1960s, a growing minority of Secondary Moderns had opened sixth forms and were getting pupils through 'A' levels and into university. I strongly suspect that many comprehensives. disorderly and demoralised, now offer a much worse education than many Secondary Moderns used to.

The grammar schools worked well for those who went to them. But not enough children did go to them. . To look at the old tripartite system in 1965 and to conclude that the best cure was to shut the grammar schools is like looking at a patient with gangrene in his right leg, and proposing to cure him by sawing off his healthy left leg.

Many other things could have been done. More grammar schools could have been created, especially for girls. The Secondary Moderns could have been lavished with much of the cash spent on failed comprehensive plans (for which there never was, and never has been since, any educational argument).

The Technical Schools, proposed in 1944 but never built, should have been built. Many, many children do not benefit from academic education but do benefit greatly from vocational teaching. Our economy and society continue to suffer daily from this lack, which is one of the reasons for the importation of huge numbers of migrants to do important jobs that our own school-leavers do not know how to do.

As for the eleven-plus, it is not by any means the only way of selecting pupils. Germany has selection in all its states - recently reintroduced in the former East Germany (proof, by the way, that you can bring grammar schools back, in this case after an absence of 50 years). But it is done by mutual agreement between home and school, and those who believe they have been unfairly allocated are given the chance to prove themselves. There is no reason why pupils could not transfer later, at any age, if they show themselves to be suited for grammar school.

Why is selection good?

That depends on the kind of selection. Open selection, on academic grounds, is surely the way to select pupils for schools. If you don't have this kind of selection, then it doesn't mean you don't have any. We have a great deal of selection at the moment, by religion, by catchment area, by 'interviews' and other stratagems designed to uncover the class and background of the pupil. There are also the 'sixth-form colleges' which manage to exclude large numbers of disruptive pupils by waiting for them to leave school and offering only academic 'A' levels to keep away the non-middle-class intake. No good school could long survive without selection of some sort. Labour politicians are especially adept at wangling their children into good schools by using it. But it is covert, unfair, based on wealth and influence and cunning. Academic assessment is fairer and better.

We should not try to seek perfection here. It is not available. We should instead pursue the best possible arrangements. It is true that non-selective schools can sometimes be very good under a strong charismatic head, that large injections of private money can improve matters. That is basically how the very small number of City Academies manage. But for most schools, exceptional heads and pennies from heaven are not really very likely. They have to make do with ordinary heads and the usual budget. The trick is to create a structure which promotes quality, discipline, order and learning. And the selective system does that more effectively than any other.